Video focusses on initial bombardment of station house with projectiles, police efforts to encircle protesters, and the massive fireworks blast against the police station building. That blast forced the cops to switch to pushing protesters away from the station. Neither mass arrest nor dispersal attempts worked.
The 28th of October saw a second night of protest and heavy direct
action at MPD's 4D headquarters for Karon Hylton. As riot cops blocked
night culminated in a massive fireworks blast against the building. An
attempt to kettle the crowd failed, cops ended up just pushing everyone
south on Ga Ave.
As the initial march arrived at 4D, protesters and neighborhood
residents engaged the police station with projectiles as soon as they
were within range. Projectiles showered in, and police station windows
were broken for the second night in a row. Bike cops set up behind
protesters blocking every exit and entrance route, leaving only narrow
gaps for anyone daring enter or leave. This is in violation of both the
Pershing Park mass arrest settlement and the earlier DC Council
legislation, which forbid "encircling protesters with police lines."
Some of the protesters filtered out, only to set up new positions on the
other side of the police lines of nose to tail bikes.
At this point, half the cops on the north side potential kettle
line had to shift their focus from the protesters on the inside to the
additional protesters on the outside. A number of minor incidents
ensured but not arrests seen by this author. For about two hours, the
scene stabilized in place. At one point, Karon Hylton's father took up
the megaphone on Ga Ave, on the street opposite 4D's doors. Seemingly in
response to this an additional line of riot cops swarmed out of 4D and
marched in formation to that side of the street. Shortly therafter
protesters opened up with the fireworks.
These fireworks served as very effective artillery support. At one
point a police helicopter showed up, but the pilot quickly thought
better of flying into an area containing active fireworks displays and
flew away. While the police attacked almost immediately after the big
blast at the building, more fireworks were set off in the path of the
advancing cops, and cops who were supposed to use the S side bike line
as the lid of the kettle may have thought better of it. A serious
attempt at a kettle may have been planned at the Walgreens, with
transport vans showing up and a report of a "serious run at protesters."
In the end however, all these cops simply could not achieve the level
of street domination it would have taken to load so many furious, angry,
resisting protesters into arrest vans.
There were some exceptionally ugly incidents, notably cops pepper
spraying into an occupied McDonald's while children were inside. This
sort of thing could have gotten even worse, but soon things must have
been diverting police attention to other parts of town. At nearly the
same time as the kettle attempt and "McMace" incident, cops were
reported blocking streets in Georgetown for unknown reasons. Possibly
someone gave them something else to do just as things started looking
dire on Georgia Ave? As the night went on, protesters managed to stay
together even as cops pushed them farther and farther from 4D. A
considerable amount of pepper spray, smoke and/or tear gas, and
flashbang grenades were fired at protesters, but they stayed in the
streets well past 1 AM. "Anoncat" reported on Twitter that 14 MPD officers were injured in the fighting.
